Beachcombers poked at an exposed part of the Monte Carlo. When the boat hit the beach 70 years ago, roulette wheels, slot machines, dice, furniture and whiskey bottles cluttered the shore. CORONADO – It was a novelty in 1936, the Monte Carlo, a ship the length of a football field anchored about 3 miles offshore. Outside the bounds of state and federal law, yet only a water taxi ride away, it offered what could not be had legally ashore: gambling and prostitution. Or as the offerings were known at the time, “Drinks, dice and dolls.” The enterprise was thought to be run by the mob, and local ministers railed against it. Law enforcement officials fumed at what they considered a flaunting of the law. But the whole enterprise came to a crashing end 70 years ago on New Year’s Day 1937. Closed the November before for the winter and with only two caretakers aboard, the Monte Carlo tore from its mooring during a storm and crashed onto the beach just after dawn a quarter-mile south of the Hotel del Coronado. With little warning, the “palace of sin” was ashore and people rushed to the beach to get souvenirs, recalled Joe Ditler, executive director of the Coronado Museum of History & Art. There was a clutter of roulette wheels, slot machines, dice, furniture and whiskey bottles thrust from the ship and scattered about the surf and beach. “People wiped the bottles off and drank them on the beach,” Ditler recalled yesterday during a stroll along the same stretch of sand. The police came to confiscate what gambling equipment wasn’t pilfered, he said. Today, what is left of the Monte Carlo is a 300-foot-long slab of concrete that had been put in the hull to keep the ship in place at sea. The back end of the concrete ballast is often visible in the surf. Red flags mark the beach there and a sign warns of an underwater obstruction. City work crews routinely smooth protruding or sharp, eroding surfaces. Even so, many people have gotten scraped from surfing or swimming over it or have used it as a platform for fishing. “The wreck is still a factor in our lives,” said Ditler, 55, who can recite local history of houses, smokestacks, sand dunes and almost anything he glances upon as he moves about town. For many locals, the story of the Monte Carlo that long ago New Year’s was as fresh as yesterday’s beach walk. “My dad went out there to look” when it wrecked, said Al Hansen of Coronado, who was out on the sand with his daughter. Hansen, a retired county education department administrator, said he used to swim around the slab to spearfish for halibut. Ditler has interviewed people who visited the ship at sea and those who came to the shore after it wrecked. In the early 1980s, he spoke with Katherine Carlin of Coronado, who visited the Monte Carlo once with a date and returned with reports of smoke-choked gambling parlors where “skinny women in tiny skirts danced on the tables.” Disapproving, the two promptly left. The same mob organization that reportedly ran the Monte Carlo had at least two other gambling boats: the Reno, off Orange County; and the Rex, off Santa Monica, which operated for a couple of years, Ditler said. “All the appeals of the South Seas, New York, Paris and Monte Carlo,” one flier for the local ship promised. The district attorney in San Diego had been working to shut it down by seeking to regulate the water taxi service and thereby deny transportation to the floating gambling house. The New Year’s storm that foundered the ship ended the saga. Among those who came to see the fresh wreck was Bud Bernard, 13 at the time, who told Ditler in an interview that he was approached that morning by four men wearing fedoras and trench coats. He thought they were the ship’s owners and accepted their $20 offer to swim out, climb aboard the shifting wreck and report what was inside. “What he sees and what he tells them are two different things,” Ditler said. Bernard reported broken bottles, broken equipment, broken furniture and “just destruction.” The men, satisfied there was nothing more to be gained, left. The boat actually held one more enticement. “He saw silver dollars scattered all over the floors,” Ditler said, and over the next several weeks, Bernard and a couple of friends visited the wreck, returning home each time with pockets full of silver dollars. Ditler pulled from his pocket a 1923 silver dollar, a gift from Bernard. Source: Union Tribune / David Graham: (619) 542-4575; [email protected]
